A Survey on the Adoption of Patterns for Engineering Software for the Cloud

• Type: Article in International Scientific Journal
• Date: 2021

Authors

Tiago Boldt Sousa (Author) Other; Hugo Sereno Ferreira (Author) FEUP; Filipe Figueiredo Correia (Author) FEUP

Journal

Title: IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering

Pages: 1-13

ISSN: 0098-5589

Publisher: IEEE

Indexing

ISI Web of Knowledge - 6 Citations

Scopus - 11 Citations

Other information

Authenticus ID: P-00T-9TF

DOI: 10.1109/tse.2021.3052177

Abstract (EN): This work takes as a starting point a collection of patterns for engineering software for the cloud and tries to find how they are regarded and adopted by professionals. Existing literature assessed the adoption of cloud computing with a focus on business and technological aspects and fall short in grasping a holistic view of the underlying approaches. Other authors delved into how independent patterns can be discovered (mined) and verified, but do not provide insights on their adoption. We investigate (1) their relevance for professional software developers, (2) the extent to which product and company characteristics influence their adoption, and (3) how adopting some patterns might correlate with the likelihood of adopting others. For this purpose, we surveyed practitioners using an online questionnaire (n = 102). Among other findings, we conclude that most companies use these patterns, with the overwhelming majority (97%) using at least one. We observe that the mean pattern adoption tends to increase as companies mature, namely when varying the product operation complexity, active monthly users, and company size. Finally, we search for correlations in the adoption of specific patterns and attempt to infer causation among them, further hinting on how some practices are dependent or influence the adoption of others. We conclude that there are patterns of practices adoption that best correlates with a specific company and product characteristics, as well as relationships between the patterns that were not covered by the original pattern language and which might deserve further investigation. IEEE

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific

No. of pages: 13